Israeli war planes hit
the cities of Sidon, south Beirut and Baalbak on Saturday
and Israeli ground troops fought a hard battle to take over the village
of Maroun al-Ras, said to be a Hizbullah rocket-launching site. The
Israeli bombing of Sidon
hit a religious complex linked to Hizbullah. The BBC reports that 'The
UN's Jan Egeland said half a million people needed assistance - and the
number was likely to increase. One-third of the recent Lebanese
casualties, he said, appeared to be children. '

"More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army
officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record
basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks,
setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail."

The
Israelis tend to launch their wars of choice in the summer, in part
because they know that European and American universities will be the
primary nodes of popular opposition, and the universities are out in
the summer. This war has nothing to do with captured Israeli soldiers.
It is a long-planned war to increase Israel's ascendency over Hizbullah
and its patrons.

But since Hizbullah's short-range katyushas can only hit targets 3-4
miles away, and were mainly being fired at the occupied
Shebaa Farms, why worry about it so much?

1.
If Hizbullah forced Israel out of the Shebaa Farms, it might increase
pressure for it to give back the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and all
of the West Bank-- the other territories stolen by Israel in 1967. The
Israelis have their own Domino Theory, which haunts them the way the
original haunted Lyndon Johnson-- and just as foolishly.

2. Some
of Hizbullah's missiles might have been able to hit sensitive Israeli
chemical or nuclear sites, or just cause panic by hitting Israeli
cities. There was zero likelihood of Hezbollah launching such a strike
unprovoked. But this capacity formed at least a slight drag on the
Israeli ability to strike Iran and the Palestinians with impunity. The
destruction of the Hizbullah arsenal may be the precursor of even more
drastic action against the Palestinians and perhaps a bombing raid on
Iran's nuclear research facilities near Isfahan.

Israel is a
regional superpower, the only nuclear power in the Middle East proper,
and possessing the most technologically advanced military capability
and the most professional military. Since Egypt opted out of the
military struggle for economic reasons and since the US invasion broke
Iraq's legs, there is no conventional military threat to Israel. Israel
seeks complete military superiority, for several reasons. One impetus
is defensive, on the theory that it has to win every contest and can
never afford to lose even one, given its lack of strategic depth (it is
a geographically small country with a small population, caught between
the Mediterranean and potentially hostile neighboring populations). But
the defensive reasons are only one dimension.

There are also
offensive considerations. The Right in Israel is determined to
permanently subjugate the Palestinians and forestall the emergence of a
Palestinian state. This course of action requires the constant exercise
of main force against the Palestinians, who resist it, as well as
threats against Arab or Muslim neighbors who might be tempted to help
the Palestinians. Thus, Iraq and Iran both had to be punished and
weakened. Likewise, the Israeli Right has never given up an
expansionist ideology. For instance, the Israelis have a big interest
in the Litani River in south Lebanon. If and when the Israeli military
and political elite felt they needed to add territory by taking it from
neighbors, they wished to retain that capability.

The remaining
challenges to complete Israeli military superiority and freedom of
movement are 1) asymmetrical forces such as Hamas and Hizbullah
guerrilla cells wielding rockets and 2) the menace of future
unconventional challenges such as an Iranian nuclear weapon (circa 2016
if in fact the Iranians are working on it, which is not proved). Given
the alliance of Shiite Hizbullah with Shiite Iran, one capability
shielded the other.

That this war was pre-planned was obvious
to me from the moment it began. The Israeli military proceeded
methodically and systematically to destroy Lebanon's infrastructure,
and clearly had been casing targets for some time. The vast majority of
these targets were unrelated to Hizbullah. But since the northern Sunni
port of Tripoli could theoretically be used by Syria or Iran to offload
replacement rockets that could be transported by truck down south to
Hizbullah, the Israelis hit it. And then they hit some trucks to let
truck drivers know to stay home for a while.

For
the Bush administration, Iran and Hizbullah are not existential
threats. They are proximate threats. Iran is hostile to US corporate
investment in the oil-rich Gulf,, and so is a big obstacle to American
profit-making in the region. Rumsfeld
is worried about Iran's admission as an observer to the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization,
which is to say, that he is worried about a budding Chinese-Islamic
axis that might lock up petroleum reserves and block US investments. If
Chinese economic and military growth make it the most significant
potential challenger to the Sole Superpower in the coming century, a
Chinese alliance with the oil-rich Muslim regions, including Iran,
would be even more formidable. The Shanghai group has already pulled
off one coup against Rumsfeld, successfully convincing Uzbekistan to
end US basing rights in that country.

Rumsfeld also believes, contrary to all available evidence, that
Iran is actively destabilizing Iraq and is conniving with Syria and
Hezbollah to do so.
(In
fact, the Iraqis had shaped charges in their depots and did not need to
learn about them from Iran or Hizbollah). At some points, the Pentagon
has even tried to blame Iran for the radical Sunni Arab violence in
Iraq, which makes no sense at all (and thus that propaganda campaign
has been put on the back burner).

Iran also supports Syria, and Rumsfeld believes that Syria is helping
destabilize Iraq, and is also a patron for Hizbullah.

Clearly,
if one could get rid of Iran and Hezbollah, in Rumsfeld World, Iraq is
much more likely to turn out a delayed success than an absolute
disaster. And then the stalled-out rush to Bush's vision of "democracy"
(i.e. Big Private Property) in the region could proceed. In fact, the
instability in Iraq mainly comes from Sunni Arab guerrillas, who hate
Iran and it is mutual.

The Bush administration's perceived
economic and geopolitical interests thus overlap strongly with Israel's
perceived security interests, with both benefitting from an Israeli
destruction of Hizbullah. It is not impossible that the US Pentagon
urged the Israelis on in this endeavor. They certainly knew about and
approved of the plan.

What is scarey is that Cheney and Rumsfeld
don't appear to have let W. in on the whole thing. They told him that
Bashar al-Asad of Syria stirred up a little trouble because he was
afraid that Iraq the Model and the Lebanese Cedar Revolution might be
such huge successes that they would topple him by example (just as,
after Poland and the Czech Velvet Revolution, other Eastern European
strongmen fell). (Don't fall down laughing at the idea of Iraq and
Lebanon as Republican Party success stories; people in Washington, DC,
coccoon a lot and have odd ideas about the way the world is.) So, Bush
thought, if that is all that is going on, then someone just needs to
call al-Asad and reassure him that we're not going to take him out, and
get him to rein in Hizbullah. And then the war would suddenly stop. No
one told Bush that this war was actually an Israeli war of choice and
that al-Asad had nothing to do with it, that, indeed, it could only
happen because al-Asad is already irrelevant.

Syria
is not going to give up its stance toward Israel unless it at the very
least gets back the occupied Golan Heights. That is non-negotiable for
Damascus. Since the Israeli Right is diehard opposed to making that
deal, Israel will go on occupying part of Syrian soil. Syria cannot
accept that outcome. Likewise, the Allawi regime faces a powerful
challenge from the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. The high Baath officials
would be afraid that if they made peace with Israel and got nothing out
of it for Syria, there would be a mass popular Islamist uprising. A
separate peace that leaves the Palestinians to the Israelis' tender
mercies would also stick in the craw of the Syrian public. The
administration plan will fail.

Because of their fetish for
states, the Neoconservatives of the Bush administration are unable to
see that the Levant and points east are now the province of
militia-parties that dominate localities and wield asymmetrical
paramilitary force in such a way as to stymie states, whether local
host states, local adversaries, or imperial Powers. Hizbullah in
Lebanon, Hamas and other groups in Gaza and the West Bank, al-Qaeda/
radical Bedouins in the Sinai, the Muslim Brotherhood in some Sunni
areas of Syria, the tribes and gangs of Maan in Jordan, the Peshmerga
of the Kurds, the guerrilla groups of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq, the
Mahdi Army, Badr Corps and Marsh Arabs of the Iraqi Shiites, the Basij
and Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Iran, the party-tribes of
Afghanistan--whether the Tajik Jami'at-i Islami or the Pushtun
Taliban--and the biradaris and ethnic mafias of Pakistan, are all
arguably as significant actors as states, and often more significant.

By
its assault on Middle Eastern states, whether it takes the form of
military confrontation or of "pressure" to "democratize,
Neoconservatism in Washington and Tel Aviv has increased the power and
saliency of militia rule throughout the region. The transition under
American auspices of Iraq from a strong if odious central state to
equally odious militia rule and chaotic violence is only the most
obvious example of this process. More people have been killed in terror
attacks in Iraq every month since February than were killed on
September 11, 2001 in the US, and since Iraq is 11 times less populous
than the US, the 6,000 killed in May and June are equivalent to 66,000
killed in civil war violence in the US. Condi
Rice echoes the old Neocon theory of "creative chaos"
when she confuses the Lebanon war with "the birth pangs" of a "new"
Middle East. The chief outcome of the "war on terror" has been the
proliferation of asymmetrical challengers. Israel's assault on the very
fabric of the Lebanese state seems likely to weaken or collapse it and
further that proliferation. Since asymmetrical challengers often turn
to terrorism as a tactic, the "war on terror" has been, at the level of
political society below that of high politics and the state, the most
efficient engine for the production of terrorism in history.